Date:   Fri, 9 Apr 2021 14:45:48 +0000
From:   Chuck Lever III <chuck.lever@...cle.com>
To:     Tom Talpey <tom@...pey.com>
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Subject: Re: [PATCH rdma-next 00/10] Enable relaxed ordering for ULPs



> On Apr 9, 2021, at 10:26 AM, Tom Talpey <tom@...pey.com> wrote:
> 
> On 4/6/2021 7:49 AM, Jason Gunthorpe wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 05, 2021 at 11:42:31PM +0000, Chuck Lever III wrote:
>>  
>>> We need to get a better idea what correctness testing has been done,
>>> and whether positive correctness testing results can be replicated
>>> on a variety of platforms.
>> RO has been rolling out slowly on mlx5 over a few years and storage
>> ULPs are the last to change. eg the mlx5 ethernet driver has had RO
>> turned on for a long time, userspace HPC applications have been using
>> it for a while now too.
> 
> I'd love to see RO be used more, it was always something the RDMA
> specs supported and carefully architected for. My only concern is
> that it's difficult to get right, especially when the platforms
> have been running strictly-ordered for so long. The ULPs need
> testing, and a lot of it.
> 
>> We know there are platforms with broken RO implementations (like
>> Haswell) but the kernel is supposed to globally turn off RO on all
>> those cases. I'd be a bit surprised if we discover any more from this
>> series.
>> On the other hand there are platforms that get huge speed ups from
>> turning this on, AMD is one example, there are a bunch in the ARM
>> world too.
> 
> My belief is that the biggest risk is from situations where completions
> are batched, and therefore polling is used to detect them without
> interrupts (which explicitly). The RO pipeline will completely reorder
> DMA writes, and consumers which infer ordering from memory contents may
> break. This can even apply within the provider code, which may attempt
> to poll WR and CQ structures, and be tripped up.

You are referring specifically to RPC/RDMA depending on Receive
completions to guarantee that previous RDMA Writes have been
retired? Or is there a particular implementation practice in
the Linux RPC/RDMA code that worries you?


> The Mellanox adapter, itself, historically has strict in-order DMA
> semantics, and while it's great to relax that, changing it by default
> for all consumers is something to consider very cautiously.
> 
>> Still, obviously people should test on the platforms they have.
> 
> Yes, and "test" be taken seriously with focus on ULP data integrity.
> Speedups will mean nothing if the data is ever damaged.

I agree that data integrity comes first.

Since I currently don't have facilities to test RO in my lab, the
community will have to agree on a set of tests and expected results
that specifically exercise the corner cases you are concerned about.


--
Chuck Lever

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